In a storage system, a user often intends to perform data migration due to various reasons, i.e., migrating data from one storage device to another storage device. For example, data migration might be performed due to data relocation, data backup (DB), disaster tolerant (DC), rescheduling based on a service level agreement (SLA), data distribution, data aggregation, etc.
Currently, some products or technical solutions for data migration have been proposed. These products and technical solutions are mainly adapted to middle and small-scale data environments or a single application scenario, and have the following drawbacks:
Firstly, these solutions are usually only suitable for some specific application scenarios, migration targets, and migration requirements. For example, in actual applications, there are various data formats, such as files, file systems, magnetic discs, databases, virtual machines, and even containers. However, the existing solutions usually only support one or limited number of data migration formats. As far as migration modes are concerned, the prior art generally cannot support all of the following common modes, e.g., synchronization, asynchronization, layering, data streams, etc. As far as migration targets are concerned, the prior art always has relatively strict restrictions on the source end and the target end, e.g., requiring that the target end and the source end should have the same hardware type and configurations, etc.
Secondly, these existing solutions adopt a design with a close-coupling architecture in the aspect of technical implementations and most of them are based on specific hardware appliances. This results in a poor universality and a difficulty in fast extension.
In a large scale data center or a cloud computing environment, the above drawbacks will bring severe challenges. Therefore, it is desired to provide a uniform and scalable data migration solution.
In the embodiments of the present disclosure, methods and an apparatuses are provided to solve at least some of the above problems.